This new jarl, the second founder of the line of Orkney jarls,
conquered Caithness and Sutherland as far south as Ekkjals-bakki,[7]
which is believed by some to be in Moray, and by others, with more
truth, to be the ranges of hills in Sutherland and Ross lying to the
north and to the south of the River Oykel and its estuary, the Dornoch
Firth; and the second part of the name still happens to survive in the
place-name of Backies in Dunrobin Glen and elsewhere in Cat where the
Norse settled. About the year 890,[8] after challenging Malbrigde
of the Buck-tooth to a fight with forty a side, to which he himself
perfidiously brought eighty men, Sigurd outflanked and defeated his
adversary, and cut off his head and suspended it from his saddle; but
the buck-tooth, by chafing his leg as he rode away from the field,
caused inflammation and death, and Jarl Sigurd's body was laid in howe
on Oykel's Bank at Sigurthar-haugr, or Sigurds-haugr, the Siwards-hoch
of early charters now on modern maps corruptly written Sidera or
Cyderhall, near Dornoch, which, when translated, is Sigurd's Howe.[9]
"Thenceforward," as Professor Hume Brown tells us, "the mainland
was never secure from the attacks of successive jarls, who for long
periods held firm possession of what is now Caithness and Sutherland.
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